RuDS

RuDS is a native Rust blogging desktop application and the successor to bDS2. It manages local projects from authoring through preview, static-site generation, integrity checks, and publishing while preserving the existing bDS filesystem and SQLite formats.

The desktop is a single-window application: closing its window persists UI state and exits RuDS. Background notifications remain unobtrusive and preserve keyboard focus while editing; errors stay visible until dismissed.

The project is under active development. Core blogging workflows are broadly available; remaining core work and optional extensions are tracked separately.

Available Features

• Native Iced desktop workspace with a deep shared dark palette, a localized native macOS menu and in-window Linux/Windows menu bar, tabs, anchored editor popovers, automatically paged post/media sidebars with locale-aware post dates, calendar months, and relative-dated entity lists, row deletion, dialogs, embedded Wry previews, a live Pico CSS theme editor, direct Preferences navigation, and per-project restart restoration of the active activity, shell visibility, and open editor tabs. Every enabled control participates in Tab/Shift-Tab focus traversal and Enter/Space activation; holding Control+Option on macOS or Control+Alt elsewhere reveals direct shortcuts plus stable two/three-letter codes for visible generic controls, filters those codes as they are typed, and lets Escape cancel while Option/Alt alone remains available for character entry. The in-window menu supports Alt mnemonics and arrow-key navigation. Its shared task UI keeps queued work off blocking workers, presents active local and remote work plus recent history in bDS2-style grouped progress cards, and supports cooperative cancellation without oversubscribing background work.
• Post and translation authoring with change-aware draft/published/archive lifecycle, file-backed change discard, canonical draft reopening after manual translation edits, non-disruptive automatic translation, desktop archive/unarchive actions, in-place published-frontmatter updates, metadata, tags, categories, cursor-preserving link and media insertion, live link/backlink graphs, media, and batch gallery-image import.
• Media import including HEIC/HEIF decoding, q80 WebP thumbnails (plus q85 AI JPEGs), metadata translations, filters, validation, post assignment, and sequential drag-and-drop insertion into post editors.
• WordPress WXR migration with saved analyses, HTML-to-Markdown and shortcode conversion, conflict/taxonomy review, recoverable 500-item execution batches, media-parent linking, progress reporting, and optional AI-assisted taxonomy mapping.
• Post, Liquid template, and Lua script editing with dedicated syntax highlighting, explicit syntax-check feedback, change-aware published/draft lifecycle, normalized collision-safe template/script slug changes, reference-safe template renames, publish-time enforcement of the bDS2 Liquid tag/filter/operator subset, and bounded process-local compiled Lua reuse with a fresh sandbox per invocation, using a custom Ropey/Syntect/Cosmic Text editor and the documented, bDS2-signature-compatible project-scoped bds host API across utilities, rendered macros, and Blogmark transforms, including airplane-gated Git sync.
• SQLite and filesystem persistence with byte-canonical bDS2 frontmatter, media sidecars, metadata JSON, and OPML menus; rebuild; bidirectional metadata diff/repair including project categories and publishing preferences; stale post-path cleanup on republish; bDS2-compatible checksums and NFD slug generation; and FTS5 search.
• Optional on-device multilingual semantic search and similar-post tag suggestions backed by a persistent USearch index, plus always-available partial-name tag and category autocomplete and duplicate-post review in the desktop workspace.
• Read-only in-app browsers in the Help menu for the bundled global DOCUMENTATION.md, the generated Lua API reference with public types and runnable examples, the CLI/server/TUI documentation, and the MCP server documentation, with safe GFM rendering and confirmed external links.
• A localized Tags workspace manages tags and category settings; its category table includes the main language and every configured translation, whose titles are used by matching category archives and menu entries.
• A localized OPML menu editor manages pages, submenus, and category archives with protected Home ordering, keyboard-accessible tree controls, drag-and-drop, and bDS2-compatible persistence.
• Project-scoped typed domain events synchronize desktop views and cached runtime settings with shared-engine and CLI mutations even when Preferences is closed; persisted CLI notifications are consumed once, and the selected UI language is shared through settings.
• Headless bds-cli automation for rebuild/repair/render, with live terminal progress through metadata comparison, site validation, and page rendering; publishing and Git sync; post/media/gallery creation; effective shared settings with secret-presence redaction; projects; utility Lua tasks; JSON I/O; airplane-mode AI routing; and package-linked CLI installation from Settings → Data or bds-cli install.
• Local MCP automation over stdio or a localhost-only stateless HTTP endpoint, with project resources, read/search/count tools, uniquely identified inert write proposals, clean duplicate-pending rejection, explicit desktop approval, and opt-in Claude Code/Copilot configuration.
• A fully localized Ratatui terminal workspace, available locally through bds-cli tui/BDS_MODE=tui and remotely through authenticated SSH shell sessions, with selection-following scrollable sidebars, shared post/template/script editing and publishing, project/search/command overlays, settings, tags, Git, reports, task progress, live multi-client locale updates, and airplane-mode AI gating.
• bds-cli server hosting the shared application engines over a loopback-by-default, public-key-only SSH service, with restrictive private key material, live authorization updates, terminal-session transport, CLI-change synchronization, ordered domain/task events, and native desktop remote-project selection.
• bDS2-compatible Markdown/Liquid rendering with built-in macros rendered from bundled Liquid templates in isolated scopes (customizable with macros/* partial-template slugs), project-description homepage headings, category-controlled list title visibility, descriptive category archive titles, canonical multilingual and flat page routes for every configured blog language, recursive menus, calendar archives, feeds, a root hreflang sitemap, Pagefind, shared cached multicore full-site rendering, change-aware and forced full renders from the native Blog menu/CLI/TUI, and fast route/mtime-based incremental validation whose targeted repair refreshes affected aggregate pages through cancellable section task groups with bDS2-style per-URL progress.
• Navigable generated-route preview in the app or system browser, with draft database overlays and published filesystem content.
• Optional one-shot AI translation, description, analysis, taxonomy, and language-detection operations are available immediately after restart and run in background tasks with editor-level waiting indicators, using provider-portable JSON-only requests through independent online and local OpenAI-compatible profiles. Automatic translation rejects blank AI results, retries one failed request with a visible warning, reports a failed retry, and refreshes open editors without discarding newer edits. Each profile has secure credentials, persistently discovered chat/title/image model selections, explicit tool/vision overrides, chat testing, and restart-persistent status-bar airplane-mode routing.
• Persistent conversational AI with safe Markdown, streamed and cancellable responses, model/session/token tracking, bounded project-aware blog tools, and localized conversation management in the Chat workspace. Allowlisted render tools add persistent native cards, charts, forms, lists, metrics, mind maps, tables, and tabs without executing assistant-provided HTML or JavaScript.
• SSH-agent-based SCP or rsync publishing.
• Integrated Git workflow for each blog project's current repository, with repository initialization, read-only origin discovery, Git LFS image tracking, status and diffs, branch/file history with bDS2-compatible sync-status colors, commits, cancellable fetch/pull/push, and post-pull filesystem reconciliation; network actions respect airplane mode.
• Site validation detects and repairs stale content at every generated post URL, alongside media and translation validation plus ruds://new-post Blogmark capture and Lua transforms; captures open directly in the post editor as soon as the draft exists without changing the current or restored sidebar state or waiting for on-device semantic indexing, and defer automatic translation until an explicit manual save, which queues one task per still-missing language. Rendering tasks keep long generated URLs compact in progress messages. Publishing never starts automatic translation. bDS2 keeps its separate bds2:// bookmarklet protocol.

RuDS uses no JavaScript application runtime and loads no CSS or JavaScript from CDNs. The preview is served by the Rust application and displayed by the operating-system webview.

The packaged macOS applications require macOS 26 or newer.

Packaged executables share native bds-core and bds-server dynamic libraries. ONNX Runtime is linked statically where supported; Intel macOS carries Microsoft's final x64 runtime and license because current upstream releases no longer provide that architecture, while Windows carries Microsoft's DirectML redistributable and license for GPU-accelerated local embeddings. The Install CLI action replaces ~/.local/bin/bds-cli with a symbolic link to the packaged CLI, so the command executes beside the same runtime libraries and always follows the package selected by the latest installation.

Local macOS packages are ad-hoc signed without hardened runtime. A Developer ID and notarization remain optional release-channel steps for downloads that should pass Gatekeeper without a user override.

Pushing a tag creates a draft Gitea release, builds native artifacts on the Linux arm64 runner, and publishes only after every target succeeds. Releases contain CLI/MCP and desktop downloads for Linux arm64/x64, macOS arm64/x64, and Windows x64. Linux desktop binaries are dynamically linked to the GTK 3, WebKitGTK 4.1, and libxdo packages supplied by the target Ubuntu architecture. macOS desktop downloads are ad-hoc-signed DMGs; Unix archives use .tar.gz and Windows uses .zip. All release packaging and Gitea API work is performed by the workspace's Rust release utility.

Repository Map

• crates/bds-core — data, engines, rendering, AI, publishing, and Lua
• crates/bds-editor — reusable syntax-highlighting editor
• crates/bds-ui — desktop application and platform integration
• crates/bds-cli — headless automation CLI over the shared engines
• crates/bds-mcp — packaged stdio MCP transport over the shared MCP engine
• crates/bds-server — reusable headless host, SSH transport, remote protocol, and desktop client library
• crates/bds-release — portable tagged-release packaging and Gitea publishing utility
• specs — authoritative Allium behavior specifications
• fixtures — compatibility projects and generated-site fixtures
• locales — UI and native-menu translations

References

• Specification index
• User guide
• CLI, headless server, and terminal UI
• MCP server
• UI style guide
• ../bDS2 — reference implementation when an Allium contract is ambiguous

Contributor workflow and project invariants are documented in AGENTS.md.

Development gates

Install the dependency audit tools once:

cargo install cargo-machete cargo-outdated

Before committing, verify dependency usage and freshness, then build and test the complete workspace:

cargo machete --with-metadata
cargo outdated --workspace --root-deps-only --exit-code 1
cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace

The full test suite starts loopback-only mock and preview servers, so localhost binding must be permitted.

Headless server

Run bds-cli server for a dedicated headless process, or set BDS_MODE=server when launching bds-ui. The SSH listener defaults to 127.0.0.1:2222; use --bind/BDS_SSH_BIND and --port/BDS_SSH_PORT to opt into another address. Startup prints the private authorized_keys path. The desktop creates its own private id_ed25519.pub; add that public key to the server file, then use File → Connect to Server… and select a remote project. Host keys are recorded on first connection and verified thereafter. Run bds-cli tui or set BDS_MODE=tui for the local terminal workspace; an authenticated SSH shell opens the same workspace against server-side data and locale. Press : for its command list and :? for help.